Prominent Gay Cuban American writer wasn't actually Cuban

He had repeated that piece of biography so many times over the years to his professors and academic colleagues, to his husband and fellow writers, that “he probably believed it himself,” said his sister, Susan Carroll, 58, who lives in Michigan.

In fact, he was born in Detroit to parents who were native Michiganders, both teachers, according to Susan Carroll and her daughter, Jessica Webley. They said no one in their family is Latino. As for the piano, he was self-taught and not a widely traveled performer. “My brother was very talented,” Carroll said. “He could see something, watch something, hear something, and do it.”

Evidently, that was how he became fluent in Spanish, she said.

In Carrillo’s 2004 novel, “Loosing My Espanish,” a Chicago teacher, Óscar Delossantos, is being fired, and he tries in his final weeks to instill a love of cultural history in his middle-class, U.S.-bred Cuban American students. But the teenagers don’t care a whit about their ancestral homeland or the terrors of revolution and escape. Unlike Óscar, none ever dangled “from a little piece of twine over the Florida Straits,” with sharks circling below.

Nor are they moved by Óscar’s familial memories of Miami detention, the “concertina wire, dogs with vicious teeth and feet and yards and cubic miles of forms with thousands and thousands of blank spaces to be completed; English, and being made to feel stupid and like a hero and unwanted and saved all at the same time.”

After he became a writer in the 1990s, adopting the name Carrillo and a fictitious backstory, “we never saw him much,” said Webley, 36, who lives in Detroit. His loved ones had always called him “Glenn,” his middle name. “Glenn always kept his family and social life separate,” she recalled.

VanEngelsdorp, who was in a years-long relationship with Carrillo before they married in 2015, said that after the story appeared online, he learned the truth about his husband’s early life from Susan Carroll, whom he barely knows.

“At first, I was just so downcast,” he said Saturday, in a quiet voice. “I’ve only met his family by text. I never understood why he would never introduce me. Now I do.”

Creepy. That's sociopath behavior. I guess he had some talent but that's complete bullshit to do to others. Reminds me of talentless David Hampton.

He's hardly the first gay to invent a new and more glamorous background for himself, a lot of us just don't fit in with our origins.

I must say he stuck to it with unusual dedication!

He didn't want to be African American so he became Afro-Cuban. What a cunt.

Do you understand how many people he lied to? It's gross.

A male Rachel Dolezal.

Who was he actually hurting by it ? Its odd,but essentially harmless. His poor husband seems okay with it,as do his friends and family , so why the vitriol ? Many of us with less than stellar roots embellished our history when we escaped our upbringings. You could do thatback then,now of course its almost impossible.

I agree it's SOMEWHAT harmless but not harmless to his boyfriends and lovers, his family, and any professional relationships that offered him cred or money based in part on a lie. It's mental illness. Its not the same as lying to social acquaintances about how "my mother was a lady in Charleston."

His books and his professional life were somewhat based on a lie. He was also on the person-of-color gravy train in part based on a fictitious backstory. I would guess he would have lost his professorship if this lie had been revealed during his life.

I wonder how he even got away with it. For example, how did he get a fake social security number? He assumed an entirely fictitious identity for a few decades - lying to everyone.

So intriguing. Thanks, OP

Plenty of publications wouldn't have happened without this APPROPRIATION:

Loosing My Espanish (Pantheon, 2004) ¿Quién se hubiera imaginado que Desi Arnaz no era blanco? (2007) Pornografía (2007) The Santiago Boy (2006) Caridad (2005) Cosas (2004) Abejas Rubias (2004)

This is like the white guy publishing poetry under a Chinese name.

I think his charade was aided by teaching in an English department rather than in Spanish or Latin American Studies. His Spanish in the videos posted on-line is not very good and not Cuban accented. He probably explained it away as it being the result of being a child exile (which is partly the topic of his first book) but there would've been more questions in other environments.

The chair of the department that hired him at GW said he had no idea about his real background.

I think the lie does matter. You can’t really critique one’s life and experiences and if their writing is based on, or inspired by those experiences, they get a literary free pass for lot of mistakes.

Try reading his work through the prism of a white guy’s mind and then judge his writing.

I don’t know this guy and I’m not familiar with his work.

lt's keep the story clear. He was not white passing as black. He was black American passing as Cuban (cuban black).

It's the story I was told when I was a child. Try my family Empanadas recipe!

R15 I assumed incorrectly.

R13 GW has a number of shady folk.

It only matters to people like R12, who insist only people of the same race can write about their race.

If this guy's novels were good, then who the fuck cares what his ethnicity was?

And yes, R12, even a white guy writing "Chinese poetry" is okay, unless you're a racist.

I'm R12 and no I don't think that at all. I think your autobiography is irrelevant and the less biographical information we have about a written work, the better.

Idiot, I said a white guy published poetry under a pen name that was Chinese. That is different from writing "Chinese poetry."

Your reading comprehension sucks.